Want to Forecast the Grades of Your Children? Look at the Managerial Ability of the Principal
If Italian principals had the same managerial abilities of the British, Italian students would close the gap in the mathematics OECD PISA test with respect to the OECD average, a working paper by Fabiano Schivardi (Rodolfo Debenedetti Chair in Entrepreneurship) and two colleagues from Università di Cagliari (Adriana Di Liberto and Giovanni Sulis) finds.
In Managerial Practices and Students' Performance (CEPR Discussion Paper Series No. 10172) the three scholars assess the management abilities of Italian principals using the World Management Survey (WMS), a methodology that enables them to compare the outcome with the results similarly measured in Germany, Canada, Sweden, the UK and the US. They find that the ability of the principals in more centralized countries (Italy and Germany) lags behind the rest, with Italian principals at the bottom of the ranking. The Italian data was collected through extensive phone interviews of around 400 principals of upper secondary schools.
As WMS measures the quality of management practices actually adopted in five management areas (operations, monitoring, targets, incentives and leadership) and not the managerial attitude of the principals, it would seem reasonable to attribute the differences to stricter institutional constraints in Italy, but the analysis shows that this is not the case. First of all, Italian principals perform worse than the rest both in the areas affected by the institutional constraints and in those not affected, and furthermore the principals of private schools, where the constraints are less stringent, do not perform better than the principals of public schools. The fact that a significant share of Italian principals implement very low-quality management practices points to a lack of managerial training and a weak selection process as the major drivers of the Italian low performance.
Schivardi and his co-authors, then, match the managerial ability of Italian principals to the results of a mathematics standardized test (INVALSI) of tenth grade students and verify that managerial practices have a positive and significant effect on students' performance. Managerial practices impact students' performance more in schools based in areas with a lower socioeconomic background.
In terms of magnitude of the effects, if Italian principals' managerial abilities were the same as the British, Italian students' outcomes would close the gap with respect to the OECD average in the standardized PISA test.
The scholars compare also the results of students attending schools managed by principals appointed before and after 2006 through a new selection process that evaluates managerial skills and requires specific training in resource management, and find that the latter perform significantly better. The schools offering different types of curricula, presumably more complex to manage, perform worse than the rest.
"To improve the managerial quality of Italian school principals", the scholars write, "reforming the institutional setting granting schools more autonomy will not be enough: it will also be important to devote specific attention to the selection and training process of school principals".